McMurtry sometimes surrenders to the baser instincts of the trade. He describes his rapturous delight at coming across a shed that “turned out to contain nothing but books by the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould. How often does a shed full of Baring-Gould’s three-deckers fall into your lap?” he marvels. “Who could turn that down?”
I don’t know about you, but as much as I love books — and Books — I think I probably could.
Related:
War and peace, Aesthetic genius, Founding father, More
- War and peace
Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East.
- Aesthetic genius
When I saw Marisha Pessl in the New York Times Style Section, meticulously posed on an antique chair wearing a pair of high heels and a coy smile, I cringed.
- Founding father
North America's fascinating French heritage is rarely the topic of today's leading historians.
- Interview: Art Spiegelman
"When you don't understand a painting, you assume you're stupid. When you don't understand a cartoon, you assume the cartoonist is stupid."
- Jersey state of mind
Richard Ford created Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter (1986), returned to him in Independence Day (1995), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner Award, and has now come back to him for what he says is the last time in The Lay of the Land. Listen to audio excerpt of The Lay of the Land
- Yaddo and MacDowell: Works in Progress
This article originally appeared in the July 18, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- Rooted
Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize with her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies .
- Pressing the issue
That The Race Beat works on so many levels — and reads like a novel, despite being laden with facts — testifies to the talents and pedigrees of its authors.
- Lions and lambs
The season is notable for the return to bookstores of canonical names like Atwood, Ginsberg, Kinnell, le Carré, Munro, Pynchon, and Vidal plus a fair share of younger lions like Eggers, Julavits, and Muldoon.
- Texas highs and lows
Anyone who’s listened to a homesick Texan sing the high lonesome song of longing for the Lone Star State will recognize the tune of Gail Caldwell’s memoir, A Strong West Wind .
- Something to talk about
Is it possible to rate the “single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years?”
- Less

Topics:
Books
, Entertainment, Media, Movies, More
, Entertainment, Media, Movies, Books, Pulitzer Prize Committee, Ambrose Bierce, Walter Benjamin, Larry McMurtry, Less